Sports Cards Are Now A Side Business At PSA

PSA published its April 2026 grading report this week. The Top 5 categories, in order: Pokémon, One Piece, Baseball, Basketball, Football.

Read that order again. Two trading-card-game properties came in ahead of every American major sport.

The numbers are not close. PSA graded 1,189,145 Pokémon cards in April — more than double what they graded for baseball, basketball, and football combined. One Piece, a card game most sports collectors have never heard of, beat baseball outright. Add up every Topps Chrome rookie, every Donruss Optic Pulsar, every Bowman Sterling chase, every football and basketball card too — that all adds up to 562,421. Pokémon alone beat that by 626,724.

Sports was 28% of PSA’s Top 5. TCG was 72%.

This matters because of how leverage works. For twenty years the loudest customers PSA had were sports collectors. Sports built the slab as a price tag on eBay. Sports made the registry sets worth chasing. Every fight with PSA in trade press, on podcasts, in front of Congress — sports collectors.

Which brings us to #NoPSAMay. The boycott launched May 1 with a simple plan: stop sending PSA your sports cards for a month, hurt their numbers, force them to listen.

It isn’t going to work. It can’t. The April report is the receipt: even if every baseball, basketball, and football submitter quit PSA for the entire month, PSA would still grade more cards in May than they did in any month before mid-2024. Pokémon submitters did not sign the demand letter. They are not on hobby Twitter. They are not on the SCR power rankings. They have no idea May is supposed to be a protest month, and even if they did, they would not care.

A boycott from a group that produces 28% of the volume is not a boycott. It is a hashtag. The plan would have worked five years ago when the hobby was 90% sports and PSA needed sports submitters to keep the lights on. April is the public proof that those days are over.

Three things follow from this. First, PSA will spend its money where the volume is. New features, faster turnaround, better customer service — all of that gets built for Pokémon and One Piece submitters first. Sports collectors get what’s left over. Second, the problem of PSA grading cards that PSA’s parent company also owns and sells does not get smaller because Pokémon is the bigger book. It gets bigger. Third, the things that actually move PSA — government rules, lawsuits, real competition from SGC and CGC — take lawyers and years. They do not take a month.

Sports collectors are still customers. They are no longer the customer.

And the picture gets bigger one level up. PSA is one piece of Collectors, the parent company Nat Turner runs. Over the last five years, Collectors has bought up most of the rest of the grading and authentication world. Under the same roof now: PCGS (coins), SGC (cards), Beckett (cards), WATA (video games), Card Ladder (analytics), and the Long Beach Expo coin show. $4.3 billion valuation at the last big funding round. New grading facility opens in Frankfurt this summer.

Goldin Auctions used to be on that list too. In May 2024, Collectors sold Goldin to eBay and, in the same deal, bought the eBay Vault from eBay. Ken Goldin still runs Goldin. PSA now runs the storage building underneath it — the place where collectors leave graded cards in between sales, the system that lets a card sell on eBay without anyone shipping anything. They traded the auction house for the warehouse. The warehouse is the better business.

PCGS is worth pointing at. PCGS is to coins what PSA is to cards. They turn 40 this year, and 28 of the 30 most valuable coins sold in 2025 were PCGS-graded. Same registry, same price guide, same auction-house preference — the same playbook Nat Turner is running with PSA today, his company already ran in coins a decade ago.

So push the math even further. Imagine sports walks. Then imagine TCG walks too. Collectors still owns the top coin grader, the top video game grader, the most cited price guide, the registry sets across two different collecting worlds, and the warehouse underneath the biggest sports auction house. This is not a card grading company. It is a grading and authentication empire that happens to grade more cards than anyone else.

Sports collectors do not have a volume threat anymore. Pokémon settled that in April. The leverage that does still exist is the slow kind — regulators, lawyers, real competition. None of it fits on a hashtag. None of it gets done in a month. That is the work, and #NoPSAMay is not it.

PSA published the chart themselves.

Written by

Grayson Bryce Thompson

Grayson writes about the sports card hobby — the money, the frauds, and the stories the industry doesn't want told. He's been collecting since the junk wax era and still has the boxes to prove it.